BenQ's latest home theatre projector performs well in difficult conditions thanks to high brightness levels

Expert Rating

Pros

Cons

Dynamic iris' operation is very occasionally visible

Bottom Line

BenQ'S W6000 projector is exceptionally bright for a home theatre unit, offering a reasonable compromise between colour accuracy and overall light output. It's versatile enough to be used in both dark and bright rooms, and picture quality is good enough to please both average users and enthusiasts.

Would you buy this?

Price

The BenQ W6000 is a high-end home theatre projector with a 2500 ANSI lumen rating and a 50,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. Its high maximum brightness means it doesn’t have to be confined to a home cinema room to provide good picture quality, as it performs competently in a well-lit environment as well.

The BenQ W6000 is relatively compact for a high-end home cinema projector; it's certainly smaller than the behemoth ViewSonic Precision Pro8100. A 1.5x zoom lens allows you to tailor the image size to suit your projection surface.

The BenQ W6000 isn’t a particularly attractive projector. It has a rather bulbous body, with a centre-mounted lens finished in unattractive silver. The glossy black finish should allow the projector to hide against a dark ceiling in a cinema room, but it picks up fingerprints very easily. The layout of the controls on both the remote and the projector body is similar to older BenQ products we’ve seen. It's a relatively simple five-way controller with supporting buttons allowing easy navigation through the tiered menu system.

BenQ’s W6000 home theatre projector is a good performer when it comes to image quality. Its DLP colour wheel tends to be a little under-saturated on green tones in default settings, but the BrilliantColour setting boosts vibrancy on all colour channels. We’d still probably give it a little bump on the green channel, though. Alternatively, the projector can be ISF calibrated, with both daylight and night-time settings.

The high contrast ratio allows for great detail in both bright and dark scenes. A dynamic iris is used to control light output for darker scene display and during some very fast black-to-white transitions in test video we were able to see the change in brightness levels. Otherwise the BenQ W6000’s dynamic contrast function works well. Detail in bright areas of the BenQ W6000’s projected image is good on default and cinema settings, although we preferred a slight boost to brightness settings in cinema mode to expose more dark area detail.

The BenQ W6000's manual focus is well weighted, making it easy to get the image just right. The outputted image is sharp and fine image detail is easily visible. Full HD content looks great on the BenQ W6000 — we ran through the Blu-ray versions of Angels and Demons, Terminator: Salvation and The Dark Knight and were consistently impressed.

The BenQ W6000 does have one downside shared by other high-brightness projectors — an audible exhaust fan. At 32dB it’s not deafening and the low hum isn’t annoying, but in quiet scenes of movies you can hear the projector whirring away. Switching to the low brightness setting significantly cuts down on fan noise; if you can get away with using it, it makes the BenQ W6000 much easier to live with.

We didn’t have many problems when using the BenQ W6000. Its high brightness eliminates most of our complaints with home cinema projectors and it produces sharp, clean images with good contrast. It is versatile enough to be used in the daytime when your living room or cinema room has outside light streaming in.

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